Category: Ingredients of Fear

The older I get, the more wedding invites I receive, the more often people move away, and the more times I have to wave goodbye to my friends. This week, a three-part exploratory thought process on my struggle in making friends, my fear in being left behind, and my failure to adapt to the grown up world of professional networking.

I was basically raised by television, and it seemed like every show I watched growing up was about the importance of friendship: Golden Girls, Power Rangers, Sailor Moon, Friends, Seinfeld, the list goes on.

And in every single one of these shows, we were taught that friendship was all that’s needed in our lives. We don’t need fancy jobs or fluffy retirement accounts, because our friends will always be there for us. We should also go out of our ways to help our friends, because at the end friendship is the only thing we need in this world. That and maybe a bottle of Coca-Cola.

Katie & I at Her Wedding in 2012

But the problem with learning from television is that none of these shows really prepare you for what happens when friendships end and how to carry on after that. Instead everything is just summed up into 30-minute self-contained storylines, and life is anything but that. This week, a three-part exploratory thought process on my struggle in making friends, my fear in being left behind, and my reluctance to carrying my own life forward.

Growing up my parents always taught me to be humble and to stay grounded, and over the years I somehow managed to ruminate that valuable lesson into a kidney stone of insecurity. They taught me not to boast about my achievements, so instead I learned to focus only on my failures.

A couple months ago I spent a weekend disconnecting from my otherwise turbulent life at Mavericks, California. I was at the beach by Pillar Point on a late afternoon just after it stopped raining. The clouds were clearing away, the sky was opening up, and the view to the Pacific Ocean was simply breathtaking. There were some people walking out and climbing up toward a vantage point so I followed them.

Curiosity soon turned into self-doubt when I noticed how slippery the rocks were, and that I was only wearing this cheap pair of slip-ons from Old Navy. I clumsily worked my way up, eventually to this spot where I would have to climb my way down and across a 4-foot wide pocket in order to get to where the vantage point was.

There were about five other people where I was. Some held the same initial hesitation as me, but all of them tried their way and eventually made it across. Meanwhile I just stood there for the longest time, because I was scared and more importantly frustrated at how useless I felt, unable to do something literally everyone else around me managed to do.

I literally want to go to there.

Then this guy showed up. He couldn’t have been much older than 25. He was wearing this preppy navy sweater and a nice pair of shorts, not unlike a model you’d find in a J.Crew catalog. He looked down toward the pocket for a second and just jumped from my side to the other. He just… did it.

Fear isn’t something that goes away. It lingers on, because it’s the only thing that you hold on to; like gravity it keeps you on the ground, safe from harm. Fear is also that one step from reaching your goals and dreams.

I’ve always been the baby: always the youngest in my family, in my class, and always, always the inexperienced newcomer at work.

That is until I woke up one day, looked around, and realized that was no longer the case. At Reddit meetups, at IGN, and basically everywhere I go in San Francisco, I’m consistently the oldest person in the room. My go-to ’90s references are getting outdated by the minute — who the hell is Danny Tanner?

The scariest part of being an adult isn’t the fact that you’re getting old, but this realization that you still have so much fear living inside you. Things that you’ve been afraid of your whole life, and things you’ve been meaning to work on but haven’t because you think you still have time to improve. You’ve arrived at the infamous sink or swim moment, only to realize you were too afraid of drowning so you never learned how to swim.